'Always openly and in public' : the role of judicial punishments in early modern London (c.1630-1720)

Abstract

This thesis examines the ‘public’ of judicial punishments in early modern London across a time period in which the capital transformed from a bound ‘towne’ to a metropolis with over half a million people. The efforts to deal with this growing population and the more troublesome members of society often revolved around several ‘public’ punishments in different areas of the capital. Public in the early modern world entailed several facets: the space in which these punishments occurred, the people in these spaces, and the purpose of these punishments to publicise a certain message about order and authority to these people. This thesis explores these facets and their developments across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It shows that these punishments underwent significant changes: the public execution grew in complexity and interest into a popular event designed for public consumption; book burning transitioned from a private to a public ceremony, and when book burning declined, the pillory developed into a became a punishment that relied heavily on exposing offenders to the public. The great interest in eighteenth-century London, particularly from the 1720s onwards, the ‘modernising age’, has generated a great deal of debate and extensive historiography on the role, purpose, and changing nature of public punishments in the capital and the evolving role of the populace in the process. This thesis, which focuses on the period before 1720, demonstrates that some of the major shifts in judicial policy and attitudes to crime and punishment in this ‘modernising age’ were part of more prolonged phenomena across the early modern period.